Washington, D.C
Days before Trump takes office, thousands of protestors march in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of people from around the United States rallied in the nation’s capital Saturday for women’s reproductive rights and other causes they believe are under threat from the incoming Trump administration, reprising the original Women’s March days before President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
READ MORE: Trump arriving in nation’s capital for inaugural celebrations to mark his return to power
Eight years after the first historic Women’s March at the start of Trump’s first term, marchers said they were caught off guard by Trump’s victory and are determined now to show that support remains strong for women’s access to abortion, for transgender people, for combating climate change and other issues.
The march is just one of several protests, rallies and vigils focused on abortion, rights, immigration rights and the Israel-Hamas war planned in advance of inauguration Monday. Around the country, over 350 similar marches are taking place in every state.
Jill Parrish of Austin, Texas, said she initially bought a plane ticket to Washington for what she expected to be Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’s inauguration. She wound up changing the dates to march in protest ahead of Trump’s swearing-in instead, saying the world should know that half of U.S. voters didn’t support Trump.
“Most importantly, I’m here to demonstrate my fear, about the state of our democracy,” Parrish said.
Demonstrators staged in squares around Washington ahead of the march, pounding drums and yelling chants under a slate-gray sky and in a chilly wind. Protesters then marched to the Lincoln Memorial for larger rally and fair, where organizations at the local, state and national level will host information tables.
They held signs with slogans including, “Save America” and “Against abortions? Then don’t have one” and “Hate won’t win.”
There were brief moments of tension between protesters and Trump supporters. The march paused briefly when a man in a red Make America Great Again hat and a green camo backpack walked into a line of demonstrators at the front. Police intervened and separated him from the group peacefully as marchers chanted “We won’t take the bait.”
As the protesters approached the Washington Monument, a small group of men in MAGA hats walking in the opposite direction appeared to draw the attention of a protest leader with a megaphone. The leader veered closer to the group and began chanting “No Trump, no KKK” through the megaphone. The groups were separated by high black fencing and police officers eventually gathered around.
Rick Glatz, of Manchester, New Hampshire, said he came to Washington for the sake of his four granddaughters: ” I’m a grandpa. And that’s why I’m marching.”
Minnesota high school teacher Anna Bergman wore her original pink pussy hat from her time in the 2017 Women’s March, a moment that captured the shock and anger of progressives and moderates at Trump’s first win.
With Trump coming back now, “I just wanted to be surrounded by likeminded people on a day like today,” Bergman said.
Rebranded and reorganized, the rally has a new name — the People’s March — as a means to broaden support, especially during a reflective moment for progressive organizing after Trump’s decisive win in November. The Republican takes the oath of office Monday.
Women outraged over Trump’s 2016 presidential win flocked to Washington in 2017 and organized large rallies in cities throughout the country, building the base of a grassroots movement that became known as the Women’s March. The Washington rally alone attracted over 500,000 marchers, and millions more participated in local marches around the country, marking one of the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history.
This year, the crowd was far fewer than the expected 50,000 participants, already just one-tenth the size of the first march. The demonstration comes amid a restrained moment of reflection as many progressive voters navigate feelings of exhaustion, disappointment and despair after Harris’ loss.
WATCH: Harris loss causes some to question what it will take to elect a woman president
“Before we do anything about democracy, we have to fight our own despair,” said one of the event’s first speakers, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March.
The comparative quiet contrasts sharply with the white-knuckled fury of the inaugural rally as massive crowds shouted demands over megaphones and marched in pink pussyhats in response to Trump’s first election win.
“The reality is that it’s just hard to capture lightning in a bottle,” said Tamika Middleton, managing director at the Women’s March. “It was a really particular moment. In 2017, we had not seen a Trump presidency and the kind of vitriol that that represented.”
The movement fractured after that hugely successful day of protests over accusations that it was not diverse enough. This year’s rebrand as a People’s March is the result of an overhaul intended to broaden the group’s appeal. Saturday’s demonstration promoted themes related to feminism, racial justice, anti-militarization and other issues and ended with discussions hosted by various social justice organizations.
The People’s March is unusual in the “vast array of issues brought together under one umbrella,” said Jo Reger, a sociology professor who researches social movements at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Women’s suffrage marches, for example, were focused on a specific goal of voting rights.
For a broad-based social justice movement such as the march, conflicting visions are impossible to avoid and there is “immense pressure” for organizers to meet everyone’s needs, Reger said. But she also said some discord isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Often what it does is bring change and bring in new perspectives, especially of underrepresented voices,” Reger said.
Middleton, of the Women’s March, said a massive demonstration like the one in 2017 was not the goal of Saturday’s event. Instead, it’s goal was focusing attention on a broader set of issues — women’s and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigration, climate and democracy — rather than centering it more narrowly around Trump.
“We’re not thinking about the march as the endgame,” Middleton said. “How do we get those folks who show up into organizations and into their political homes so they can keep fighting in their communities long term?”
Associated Press writers Gary Fields, Ellen Knickmeyer and Mike Pesoli contributed to this report.
Among the liquor store, barber shop and dry cleaners at the Watergate Complex’s retail plaza, there is a new pop-up museum dedicated to the scene of the crime that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Among the liquor store, barber shop and dry cleaners at the Watergate Complex’s retail plaza, there is a new pop-up museum dedicated to the scene of the crime that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency.
The temporary exhibit features the work of artist Laurie Munn — portraits of members of the Nixon administration and those connected to the Watergate break-in. The exhibit features members of Congress, the media and some who were on Nixon’s enemies list.
Keith Krom, chair of the Board of Directors of the Watergate Museum, told WTOP the exhibit was first featured in the gallery in 2012 for the 40th anniversary of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee.
“When she (Munn) learned about our museum effort, she offered to reassemble them as a way for us to expand awareness of the museum,” Krom said.
Krom, who lives in the Watergate, said his favorite portrait is of one of the special prosecutors, whose firing sparked the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973.
“I had the pleasure of being a student of Archibald Cox,” Krom said. “He served as my mentor for my third-year writing project.”
Krom said during this time, at the Boston University School of Law, he spent a great deal of time with him.
“I didn’t realize how much he must have gone through. Here he was, this one man, who was challenging the president of the United States over something pretty serious,” Krom said.
The pop-up opened in October and was recently extended to stay open until April 25. Krom said the hope is to find it a permanent location within the Watergate Complex, where they can “present the history of Watergate, but with two perspectives.”
The first would be on the building’s “architectural significance to D.C.,” he said.
“You may not like the design, you actually may hate it,” Krom said. “But you cannot deny that it changed D.C.’s skyline.”
The secondary focus would, of course, be on the mother of all presidential scandals that changed the course of American history.
“That’s where that suffix ‘-gate’ started and continues to be used for almost every scandal that comes out today,” Krom said.
The inspiration for the museum spawned from an interaction from a tourist outside the Watergate.
“He says, ‘This is the Watergate, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s one of the buildings,’” Krom recalled.
The tourist then asked Krom, “So where’s the museum?”
“I was like, ‘Oh, we don’t have a museum.’ And he literally just looked at me and said, ‘That’s so sad.’ And he got on his bike and rode away,” Krom said.
While the self-proclaimed political history nerd said he “still gets goose bumps” when he drives by the Capitol at night, Krom hopes that when people leave the museum, “they’ll walk away with a new appreciation for how our government works, the guardrails that are in place.”
“Maybe an understanding that those guardrails themselves are kind of frail, and they probably need our collective help in making sure they last — that’s what we hope to accomplish,” Krom said.
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According to the National Park Service at the National Mall, famous cherry blossoms around the nation’s capital have hit peak bloom conditions. The National Park Service X account for the National Mall proclaimed this morning, “PEAK BLOOM! PEAK BLOOM! PEAK BLOOM!”
It became apparent yesterday that the bloom would be at peak today. “Despite a sunny afternoon and patches of blue sky, the cherry blossoms remain at Stage 5: Puffy White,” the Park Service wrote on X yesterday. Stage 5, “Puffy White”, is the final stage blossoms go through before being in full bloom. They start at Stage 1 as a “Green Bud”, grow into Stage 2 with “Florets Visible”, and then florets become extended at Stage 3. In Stage 4, there is “Peduncle Elongation” which sets the stage for the puffy blossoms to appear in Stage 5. Puffy White and Peak Bloom are defined as when 70% of the blossoms on the trees reach that stage.
Peak bloom varies annually depending on weather conditions; the most likely time to reach peak bloom is between the last week of March and the first week of April. According to the Park Service, extraordinary warm or cool temperatures have resulted in peak bloom as early as March 15 in 1990 and as late as April 18 in 1958.
The planting of cherry trees in Washington DC originated in 1912 as a gift of friendship to the People of the United States from the People of Japan. In Japan, the flowering cherry tree, or “Sakura,” is an important flowering plant. The beauty of the cherry blossom is a symbol with rich meaning in Japanese culture.
Dr. David Fairchild, plant explorer and U.S. Department of Agriculture official, imported seventy-five flowering cherry trees and twenty-five single-flowered weeping types from the Yokohama Nursery Company in Japan. After experimenting with growing them on his own property in Maryland, he deemed that the cherry tree would be perfect to plant around the Washington DC area. This triggered an interest by a variety of individuals to plant the tree around Washington. In 1909 the Mayor of Tokyo, Yukio Ozaki, donated 2,000 trees to the United States on behalf of his city. When the trees arrived, they were riddled with disease and insects and to protect other agriculture, they were burned. The Tokyo Mayor made a second donation of trees in 1910, this time amounting to 3,020 trees. This started the forest of cherry trees that now line the Potomac basin around Washington DC. In a gesture of gratitude back to Japan, President Taft sent a gift in 1915 of flowering dogwood trees to the people of Japan. Thousands of trees have been added since, including another gift of 3,800 trees from Japan in 1965.
WASHINGTON (7NEWS) — Authorities are searching for an SUV after an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was struck by a hit-and-run driver in Southwest D.C. on Wednesday night.
The crash happened just before 10 p.m. at Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Forrester Street, SW.
Police confirmed the officer, an adult man, was conscious and breathing when he was rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment of his injuries. There is no word on his condition.
The driver involved fled the scene, and investigators are looking for a white Range Rover with a partial South Carolina tag of “403.”
Anyone with information is urged to call 202-727-9099 or text tips at 50411.
This is a developing story that will be updated as more information becomes available.
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